Meet the speakers
MIT Media Lab & The Institute for New Economic Thinking Young Scholars Initiative (INET-YSI) Summer Workshop
by Laurène Tran |Innovation Working Group, Young Scholars Initiative, Institute for New Economic Thinking
👋Hi, my name is Laurène. This year thanks to the efforts of Mary Kaltenberg, Besiana Balla, and Danilo Sartorello Spinola. we’ll have a fascinating summer workshop with the MIT Media Lab & The Institute for New Economic Thinking Young Scholars Initiative (INET-YSI).
If you’re joining, I guess you’re already familiar with the work of at least one of the 6 speakers, but maybe not with all of them. That’s why I’m sharing with you their main research interests, what you should read first and which paper you can’t miss.

They’ll be here for us:
- Prof. César Hidalgo (MIT Media Lab)
- Prof. Mercedes Delgado (MIT Sloan School of Management)
- Prof. Adam Jaffe (Brandeis University)
- Prof. Siqi Zheng (MIT School of Urban Planning)
- Dr. Mike Bailey (Facebook)
- Prof. Pierre-Alexandre Balland (Utrecht University, NL)
- Prof. Andrea Morrison (Utrecht University, NL)
💎 If you only have 10min, you should read THIS PAPER — The Principle of Relatedness.
Half of our 5 speakers are co-writing THE paper to synthesize their line of work.
“For decades scholars have been trying to understand how cities, regions, and countries develop. The principle of relatedness does not provide a full answer to this question, but it signals a path. More importantly, the principle of relatedness is a beautiful illustration of the collaborative nature of science. Generalizing this principle to multiple scales, activities, institutional backgrounds, and metrics, has not been the work of a lone scholar, but the result of a diverse academic community involving geographers, economists, urban planners, physicists, and more.”
César Hidalgo
#dataviz #complexity #development
“Thinking about complexity is important because people have a tendency to jump into micro explanations for macro phenomenon.”

🌠Fast-track: super cool Q&Athat covers Amazon HQ2, Hayek and Chilean trade
📑 The value in the links: Networks and the evolution of organizations
📖 Compound reading: Why Information Grows (2015)
📌 Website
Mercedes Delgado
#clusters #entrepreneurship #services

🌠Fast-track: The Supply Chain Economy and The Future of Jobs in America
👀 US Cluster Mapping Project: Mapping a Nation of Regional Clusters.
📑Clusters and Entrepreneurhsip
📌 Website
Adam Jaffe
#US patent #environnement

🌠Fast-track:
Patent Medicine
📑A tale of two market failures: Technology and environmental policy
📖 Compound reading: Innovation and Its Discontents: How Our Broken Patent System is Endangering Innovation and Progress (2007)
Siqi Zheng
#China #real-estate #environnement

🌠Fast-track: Q&A on air quality and urban development in China
👀 China Future City Lab on urbanization & entrepreneurship
📑Understanding China’s urban pollution dynamics
📖 Compound reading: Blue Skies over Beijing: Economic Growth and the Environment in China (2016)
📌 Website
Mike Bailey
#socialnetwork #tech #academy-indstry

🌠Fast-track:Measuring Social Connectedness
📌Wanna use Facebook data for your research? Send a one-page research proposal to sci_data@fb.com.
Pierre-Alexandre Balland
#EU #SmartSpecialization #cities

🌠Fast-track:TEDX “Knowledge and the city:the digital age paradox”
👀 Economic Geography in R: Introduction to the EconGeo Package
📑 What drives the geography of jobs in the US? Unpacking relatedness
Andrea Morrison
#EU #knowledge #EvolutionaryEcon

Do you have 3 min more ? ⤵️
Want to stay up to date with future opportunities?
👉 Keep up with us on the Young Scholars Directory and on Facebook.
👉 Check out our page on the Institute for New Economic Thinking website.
The Innovation Working Group views Innovation as being central to the process of economic development and growth. We look at how economic actors, policies, technology and market conditions interact and evolve over time. We provide a platform to create professional and academic networks for young scholars to share and promote their work on innovation related topics.

